Today’s videos are not comedies, but after four days in Brussels and experiencing the European Parliament in person – my mood is heavy. I worry for the world.
Orwell’s final warning – Picture of the future (On Rumble)
‘Net Zero is taking the world’s population backwards’ (On Rumble)
This week, I have been at the EU Parliament and it is not joke that “Net Zero” messaging dominates at the EU Parliament –
“It is a suicide note to the world” – Neil Oliver
This video seems apropos, given Orwell’s final message (above) to the world.
(BTW: I am looking forward to being on Neil Oliver’s show tomorrow with my friend Dr. Kat Lindley -Saturday, May 6th).
CDC admits folks aren't getting the jab. Especially children.
by Sophie Putka, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today
Just putting this out there. COVID Drops to Fourth Leading Cause of Death, CDC Says — Virus-linked deaths in 2022 dipped below those caused by unintentional injury.
Unintentional injury deaths, driven in large part by drug overdose deaths, actually dropped slightly compared with 2021, but COVID-19 deaths dropped more — by 47%. COVID-19 was listed as the underlying or contributing cause of 244,986 deaths (61.3 per 100,000) in 2022 compared with 462,193 deaths (115.6 per 100,000) in 2021.
The overall age-adjusted death rate also decreased 5.3%, from 879.7 to 832.8 per 100,000 from 2021 to 2022 (P<0.05).
The decrease in COVID-19-associated deaths came as “a welcome relief, given the overall burden of the pandemic since its global eruption in late 2019,” said David Aronoff, MD, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, and a member of the MedPage Today editorial board.
The highest weekly numbers of overall and COVID-19-associated deaths happened in the early months of 2022; they have since fallen furtheropens in a new tab or window in 2023.
Though Aronoff predicted that the CDC will keep providing guidance on preventing COVID-19, “cancer, heart disease, and unintentional injuries (including drug overdoses) remain major causes of illness and death, and it is likely that these will remain front and center in public health improvement strategies led by the CDC, state, and local health departments.”
Ahmad and colleagues suggested that their data “can guide public health policies and interventions aimed at reducing mortality directly or indirectly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and among persons most affected, including persons who are older, male, or from members of certain racial and ethnic minority groups.”
Both COVID-19 and overall death rates were highest among non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native people.
COVID-19-associated death rates were higher in males than females (76.3 vs 49.8 per 100,000), which was true for deaths overall as well. Of people who had COVID-19 on their death certificate, around 76% had it listed as the primary cause, while 5.9%, 3.9%, 1.6%, respectively, had heart disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease listed as the primary cause, as was detailed in a related MMWRopens in a new tab or window.
In 2022, heart disease caused 699,659 deaths, cancer caused 607,790 deaths, and unintentional injury caused 218,064 deaths. The number of unintentional injuries was slightly higher in 2021, at 219,487.
The report drew on National Center for Health Statistics’ (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is based off of U.S. death certificate data. It uses provisional data, or an early estimate of deaths before a final release of data, based on the flow of death certificate data to the system. Trends in deaths throughout the year used the number of deaths each week from all causes and from COVID-19.
COVID-19-associated death rates decreased for many demographic groups in 2022, but increased for those younger than 15opens in a new tab or window. They decreased in those ages 85 or older, although still remaining higher than in other age groups.
A higher proportion of COVID-19 deaths occurred at homes, nursing homes, or long-term care facilities. The proportion of inpatient hospital deaths decreased but still made up most of the COVID-19 deaths.
Limitations to the study included the use of provisional data, which are estimates. The authors also mentioned the variation in timeliness of death certificate date by jurisdiction and the potential for misclassification of some categories of race and Hispanic ethnicity reported on death certificates.
Sophie Putka is an enterprise and investigative writer for MedPage Today. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Discover, Business Insider, Inverse, Cannabis Wire, and more. She joined MedPage Today in August of 2021.
FOX Business host and former congressman Sean Duffy warned those types of comments may pose a national security risk.
The TikTok video was taken at Rainbow Oaks restaurant in Fallbrook, California, and showed diners standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The video was captioned as “the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in” with commenters claiming the incident is their “worst nightmare” and “feels like a horror movie.”
Duffy said his heart “swells” at the sight of Americans honoring the national anthem, but he issued a somber warning about the state of the country if action isn’t taken to address comments like the ones on the TikTok video.
“This is a national security risk for this country that you don’t have people who love their country, that don’t think their country is great,” he said on “Outnumbered” Wednesday.
“You’ve got all these Marxists in our elementary education, but also in our university system. If this country doesn’t get serious about rooting them out, taking them out to get back to the basic principles that have made this country so wonderful, I do think the country is doomed.”
“Outnumbered” co-host Emily Compagno noted that many of the TikTok users leaving negative comments not American.
Rainbow Oaks restaurant diners stand to salute the flag during the National Anthem. (Fox & Friends First/Screengrab)
“They can say what they want,” Compagno said. “But here to Sean [Duffy]’s point, that’s a mark of honor. That’s a mark of deep pride and respect and gratitude for the foundational elements that this country was founded on and those that sacrificed their lives supporting and defending it.”
She went on to say the voices of true American patriots won’t be silenced by progressive TikTok users.
“That also goes to show that despite the overwhelming pressure that we receive on a daily basis from the woke left, you cannot take away pride, you cannot dampen pride,” she said.
Co-host Kayleigh McEnany called out the callous attitude progressives have toward patriotic American symbols, saying she doesn’t know what’s so “triggering” about the anthem or the flag.
The anthem, she said, is about the heroes that made America great. She recalled Mara Gay of MSNBC and the New York Times saying in 2021 that it was “disturbing” to see American flags on the pickup trucks of Trump supporters.
Rainbow Oaks owner Jeanene Paulino responded to the complaints on “Fox & Friends First,” saying the TikTok user likely posted the video for attention. She assured Fox News she “won’t be stopping” her tradition of playing the anthem.
Los Angeles-based PacWest tumbled by more than 27%. It is ranked 53rd among U.S. lenders with $41.2 billion in assets as of the end of last year, according to Federal Reserve data.
Phoenix, Arizona-based lender Western Alliance, the No. 40 U.S. bank with $68 billion in assets, sank 15% while Cleveland, Ohio-based KeyCorp (KEY.N), the 20th largest bank with $188 billion in assets, fell 9%.
Comerica (CMA.N), a Dallas, Texas-based bank ranked 37th among U.S. lenders with $86 billion in assets, shed 12%. Columbus, Georgia-based Synovus Financial Corp (SNV.N), with $60 billion in assets and ranked the 42nd U.S. biggest bank, lost nearly 7%.
Valley National Bankcorp (VLY.O), which owns Valley National Bank based in Passaic, New Jersey and is the 43rd largest lender with $57 billion in assets, closed 3% lower after shedding more than 20% on Monday.
All Forms of Redistribution Are Slavery And every leftist is a kind of slave-owner.
Do I have your attention? Good. It’s time for people on the right to wake up.
At this point, I suspect that a majority of Republicans and conservatives have accepted that the welfare state is okay, but that it should be a lot smaller…
It’s okay to have welfare and Social Security and Medicaid and transfer payments of all sorts—we should just have less of them. They should be managed better. We should tailor them to reduce dependence.
No. No no no no no.
If this describes you, then I am talking to you. And though I will sound intense, I am doing this in solidarity with you, in the hopes of waking you up.
You are wrong. You have accepted a fundamentally evil premise.
You have allowed socialism to colonize your mind, just as it has colonized all of Western civilization.
The original creator of the property, wealth, income, etc. is not the sole claimant upon it.
They (the left, and government) have the authority to control the property and adjudicate between competing claims.
Both claims are not just wrong—they’re moral crimes. In order to explain why, I am going to have to hit you with some philosophy. Don’t tune out! Philosophy—good philosophy—is what made this country. It’s what undergirds the founding documents that you love and the protections they seek to enshrine. If you do not understand the philosophy, then you won’t know why the left is wrong, and why you are wrong to go along with these premies even a little bit.
Start by asking yourself why slavery is morally impermissible. Really think about it. Write your thoughts down. Chances are, you’ll come up with things like this:
Slavery is wrong because it…
forces people to labor against their will,
forces people into an arrangement they did not choose,
forcibly compels a person’s actions and choices,
creates a condition wherein one person is legally “owned” by another,
imposes punishments for resistance or attempts to escape.
You know, intuitively, that those things are morally forbidden. And yet you accept, to one degree or another, practices that, though they may differ by degree, do these exact same things. And you need to stop. Our whole civilization needs to stop.
So why are these things morally impermissible? Here’s where the philosophy really kicks in. Fortunately, it’s easy. It may sound fancy, but it really is just an expression of things that even toddlers know intuitively.
We begin with the reality of free will. Every individual has personal control over his thoughts, choices, and actions.
An individual may be subjected to forcible compulsion, but no external party can actually think, choose, or act for him. Free will is thus naturally exclusive. Free will is a consequence of personhood, and since no one’s personhood can be unmade, it is naturally inalienable.
This leads to a simple argument in which we demonstrate that free will lies at the heart of human self-ownership:
1. Exclusive, inalienable personal control over thoughts, choices, and actions (free will) grants to each individual exclusive, dispositive decision-making power over his own body and life.
2. The primary characteristic of property rights is exclusive, dispositive decision-making power.
.˙. Free will grants to each individual property rights over his own body and life.
Self-ownership is thus an outgrowth of free will. It is the quality of being the exclusive owner of one’s own body and being—of having a property in one’s own person. Let us then define self-ownership as Dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life (with all the concomitant rights and responsibilities), rooted in (naturally and morally) exclusive, inalienable personal control over thoughts, choices, and actions.
Dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life, for short.
Here again, just about everyone knows that their self-ownership is real. Savvy lefties understand that self-ownership stands in the way of their primary objective—taking the property of others by force—and thus may use sophistry to try to deny its reality. But they will react just the same as anyone else when their self-ownership is directly violated—because even they know it’s real!
Now let us return to Dinesh D’Souza’s discussion of the flute. It was created by one person: the girl who used her mind and her labor to take a previously unowned thing and convert it. This process is an outgrowth of her free will and self-ownership. Her property rights in her own person have extended to property rights in the thing she made. It is hers…and hers alone. Her property right is grounded in a natural and moral reality.
Where would any other claim come from? The utilitarian claim (the flute should go to the person who would play it the best) and the leftist claim (the flute should go to the person who “needs” it the most) have no such grounding. They are opinions. And actuating those opinions (in the context of a society) requires two things:
The violence required to take the flute from the owner, and
A “legitimate” entity empowered to deploy that violence, i.e., government.
Why do you think the left likes big government so much? They want to use violence to take people’s stuff, and government allows them to do so “legally” and “legitimately.” It also gives them jobs and power, which requires that more stuff be taken by force to fund those jobs and create that power.
Are you catching on yet?
It’s a racket. The racket provides money and power to the left’s operatives and feeds the bottomless narcissism of its virtue-signaling rank-and-filers. It’s not noble. It’s just a modernized and legitimized iteration of the age-old human strategy of taking, by force, that which has been produced by another. It’s nothing more than that, and you should not be supporting it in any form.
So as to keep the main text of this article short, I will put into the footnotes
the arguments for why the initiation of coercive force against self-ownership is itself morally impermissible. We will take those as understood.
Now, return to our list of reasons why slavery is morally impermissible. They all are demonstrably wrong because they all violate one’s dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life. They all violate self-ownership.
Our system of “legitimized” forced redistribution does the same thing It…
forces you to labor for the benefit of others, against your will;
forces you into an arrangement you did not choose;
forcibly compels your actions and choices;
imposes punishment if you resist or try to escape.
These are all clear. The last one—the concept of “ownership” of the “slave” may seem like more of a stretch, but wargame it out just a little bit…
A slave is kept in his condition by force. So are you. A slave is punished if he resists. So are you. (Try not paying your taxes for a while and watch what happens.) The slave has been forced into an arrangement he did not choose, and so have you. The slave cannot opt out and neither can you. You may enjoy dispositive decision-making power over your body and life in some areas, but not in this one. When it comes to the redistributive state, you are, in essence, a slave. If there is a difference, it is one of degree, not of kind.
Do not fool yourself into believing that “voting” gives you some sort of choice. Voting is nothing but a wish, cast into the wind, and all the incentives of democracy are a gale pushing the whole of society towards more redistribution. Never less. (Search your feelings, Luke—you know this is true.)
The people who run the redistributive state, and those who support it and fuel its continuance, believe that your stuff does not belong to you. They believe that they have a license to forcibly violate your self-ownership—the foundation of your rights as a human person. They believe that they, and their agents in government, have the legitimate right to determine what stuff of yours they steal, and how much, and when, and to whom it will be given, and what punishment you will suffer if you resist.
EVERY kind of redistribution is a species of slavery. (Even when the intended recipient is the most sympathetic of characters.) And EVERY person who actively engages in redistribution, or who empowers those who do, is a kind of slave owner.
Do not mince words. Do not dither about on the margins, wondering exactly how much moral crime is allowable.
We can acknowledge the impact of biology, upbringing, circumstances, external influences, and even luck, but the reality of free will remains. Biology and upbringing can be analogized to the earth beneath our feet, and our external circumstances to the sky above—yet in spite of these, each of us still chooses how we move upon that ground and weather life’s storms. Free will is real!
Ontological/automatic/birthright authority does not exist. All authority must either be granted or imposed upon the unwilling by means of coercive force. Any attempt to refute this claim produces a performative contradiction: Anyone who asserts automatic authority MUST use force to impose it upon anyone unwilling to grant that authority. The same applies when asserting a claim of authority on behalf of another.
The unavoidable use of the claim in the attempted refutation raises the claim to the level of an axiom. The absence of ontological authority is a natural fact. Authority is, in essence, the license to compel the actions and choices of others, and no one has this license as a mere fact of his existence. So…
1. Authority is imposed upon the unwilling by means of the initiation of coercive force.
2. No one has ontological authority (automatic authority as a mere fact of his existence) over any other.
.˙. No one has the ontological authority to initiate coercive force upon the unwilling.
The ontological authority to initiate coercive force against another does not exist, and the initiation of any such force is morally impermissible. As shorthand, then, we will say that the initiation of coercive force is ontologically and morally impermissible.
Relating this back to self-ownership…
The natural facts of reality confer upon the individual a property right—that is, exclusive, dispositive decision-making power—in his own person. Such a right constitutes a just moral claim; it came about as the result of an organic process (birth and life), and its exercise does not inherently coerce any other (save for the natural, temporary, and generally welcomed period during which parents must care for their children). Thus,
1. A naturally exclusive, inalienable property right in one’s own person (self-ownership) constitutes a just moral claim.
2. Violation of a just moral claim is morally impermissible.
3. The just moral claim of self-ownership is violated by the initiation of coercive force.
.˙. The initiation of coercive force against self-ownership is morally impermissible.
Of course, we’ve just dealt with redistribution and welfare here. Later, we’ll have to tackle taxation and government in general. But just focus on this for now. Baby steps!
A lighted sign adorns the Coca-Cola Store in Las Vegas on Feb. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Coca-Cola shareholders vote down proposal that targets pro-life states. Companies have increasingly come under public scrutiny for alleged political biases. One of the WOKE Groups holding Coke stock wanted Coke to go after pro-life states. Under the false pretense of protecting the mother.
Coca-Cola shareholders recently voted against a proposal to conduct a survey into how state laws restricting abortion impact the company’s business performance.
The proposal was introduced by As You Saw, a nonprofit that promotes ESG policies in corporations. Eighty-seven percent of controlling shares voted against the measure.
Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax Monday that enough evidence has been uncovered in the case involving the Supreme Court Dobbs decision leaker “for the Justice Department to get involved” and that the “ball is now squarely in [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s court.”
“Why doesn’t the Justice Department open an investigation?” he asked during an appearance on Newsmax’s “National Report.” “Why don’t they appoint a special counsel?
“Why are they relying on the marshal’s office? I know the marshal’s office. I was a law clerk in the Supreme Court. They’re the nicest people in the world. They help people to their seats, and they make sure there’s order in the court, but they’re not equipped to conduct a major investigation. They can’t give immunity — the Justice Department can do this.”
“There’s enough evidence now to warrant probable cause for the Justice Department to get involved on the basis of probable cause that a serious crime may have been committed,” he continued. “We cannot leave this unresolved. It must be solved.”
Dershowitz said that the implications for future cases at the high court are “horrible” and that it’s important to understand that the “leaker was not a whistleblower.”
“He was not trying to reveal government misconduct; he was trying to corruptly influence the decision of the Supreme Court,” he said. “He deserves, or she deserves, no protection at all and I think [Justice Samuel] Alito now has an obligation to go to the marshal’s office and to the chief justice and to say, Look, here’s my suspicion, not enough to name it publicly, but enough for you to call this person in and subject them either to further interrogation, a lie detector test, testimony under oath to make sure … that he’s convictable of a crime.”
“There’s a great deal more that can be done right now,” he went on. “I mean, the ultimate thing that could be done is Congress could call the reporters from Politico and ask them to name the leaker. Now they’ll say, No, no, there’s a journalistic privilege, but I’m not sure the courts will recognize the journalistic privilege when the source of the privilege was not somebody who was a whistleblower, but somebody who was either committing a serious crime or at least a serious ethical breach.
“This should be the beginning, not the end. We must discover who this leaker was. This is not an ordinary leak. This is an attempt to corruptly influence a decision of the United States Supreme Court.”
Middle school student allegedly sent home for refusing to change shirt that said ‘There are only two genders’ Liam Morrison addressed school board about his concerns on April 13.
A 12-year-old student was allegedly sent home from school after he refused to change his T-shirt that said, “There are only two genders.”
Liam Morrison, a seventh-grader at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, said he was taken out of gym class on March 21 and met with school staff who told him people were complaining about the statement on his shirt and that it made them feel “unsafe.” His comments were picked up by popular Twitter account LibsofTikTok.
“Yes, words on a shirt made people feel unsafe. They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was. I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class. When I nicely told them that I didn’t want to do that, they called my father,” he explained during a Middleborough School Committee meeting on April 13.
“Thankfully, my dad, supportive of my decisions, came to pick me up. What did my shirt say? Five simple words: There are only two genders. Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact,” he said.
Morrison added that he was told his shirt was “targeting a protected class” and was a “disruption to learning.” “Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights?” he asked. “I don’t complain when I see Pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs, just as I do,” he said.
“I was told that the shirt was a disruption to learning. No one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I’m sure I would have noticed if they had. I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one yet not another?”
Liam Morrison, 12, reads a statement during a Middleborough School Committee meeting on April 13. (YouTube / Middleborough Educational Television)
The student said “not one person” directly told him they were bothered by the words on his shirt and that other students had told him they supported his actions.
Morrison told the committee he felt like the school was telling him it wasn’t OK for him to have an opposing point of view and that he didn’t go to school that day to “hurt feelings or cause trouble.”
“I have learned a lot from this experience. I learned that a lot of other students share my view. I learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions. I know that I have a right to wear a shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions and I have a right to express those opinions. Even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution,” he stated.
Middleborough School Committee members hear concerns from 12-year-old Liam Morrison after he was allegedly sent home for refusing to change his shirt. (YouTube / Middleborough Educational Television)
“My hope in being here tonight is to bring the School Committee’s attention to this issue. I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class. Next time, it may not only be me. There might be more soon that decide to speak out.”
CNBC’s Financial Confidence Survey, conducted in partnership with Momentive, found most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
More women than men admit feeling financially stressed.
Joe Biden and a loon said the economy is great. Only 8% of Americans agree with them. CNBC did a recent survey on people personal finances. Only 8% aren’t worried or stressed out. 70% are totally stressed. The rest are somewhat stressed.
Majority living paycheck to paycheck. Two biggest worries are Inflation and the Economies instability. 59 and 43%. You even have a loon from California claiming they’re able to buy more fried chicken and flavored drinks.
OXFORD, Pennsylvania —Despite the wealth of information at our fingertips in the information age, there is a glaring emptiness that plagues us in our storytelling.
We remove nuance and replace it with sensationalism. We shun original stories because they stray too far from the pack. In the process, we miss the beauty, pain, and magic, the simplicity and grace of simple, real-life stories about the ordinary lives of people who work the soil to make America possible. The result is that we lose touch with who we are as a nation.
Bill Hostetter was sitting in the banquet hall of the massive Spooky Nook sports facility in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He was surrounded by hundreds of other farmers, as well as agriculture scientists who do research and development work for the nation’s food supply. They all traveled from across Pennsylvania to attend the annual PennAg banquet, which honors outstanding leaders in the agricultural community.
The Hostetter family has been operating their grain farm for three generations.
(Salena Zito)
Seated to Hostetter’s left was Russell Redding, Pennsylvania’s secretary of agriculture. The lights dimmed as the program began with a video recalling the Hostetter family’s impact in this country; despite most of the audience having experienced the same things, his story of sacrifice, hard work, loss, and success brought much of the packed room to tears. That included Hostetter, who had never seen the video before.
Hostetter, along with a team of research scientists from the Pennsylvania Animal Diagnostic Laboratory System, was here to accept Distinguished Service Awards for their contribution to America’s food supply. PADLS scientists keep track of zoonotic diseases, working hand in hand with farmers to ensure their farms can continue providing a reliable food supply.
Without both the grit of the farmer and the training of these hardworking scientists, we would not have that food on all of our tables every day. Yet their respective contributions are unevenly understood.
Without the hard work of the scientists at the PADLS lab, who work around the clock tracking the avian flu, its ravages could have been significantly worse than the 4 million birds lost locally last year. Hostetter’s impact on our lives is less visible, less understood especially by reporters, who are often drawn more to science than to farming. Science is something they were taught in school; farming was not. Science brings new gadgets to their lives and makes things easier. Farming, without which they could not live at all, is too far removed from where they live and what they do.
Hostetter explained that his father, Wilmer, and his mother, Joyce, started their family’s grain business in 1977, when Wilmer built a grain elevator to support the grain business he had started 10 years prior.
Before that, his parents had a well-respected dairy farm, known not just across the country but also internationally for breeding quality dairy cows.
A truck in a long line of trucks carrying signs in support of Barry Hostetter drives past the entrance of his farm.
(Salena Zito)
Bill said that he, along with his brothers Barry, Bernie, and John, were all involved with the business right from the start as kids. “I learned it literally from the ground up, working long days at the pit, unloading corn trucks and sweeping out the grain bins,” he said.
To this day, he said, he does not ask anyone working around the grain elevator to do anything he hasn’t done.
Hostetter Grain started here in Oxford with a 95,000-bushel storage bin in the spring for the wheat harvest, followed by a 95,000-bushel bin for the corn harvest.
Today, it owns three elevators outright and holds lease agreements with six other elevators with a total capacity of more than 8 million bushels.
“I remember my father and I standing out in the parking lot taking a look at that first bin and saying, ‘That’s a big bin,'” he said. “We were really concerned about filling it. Now, with all the elevators we have and the relationships we have, we fill that 95,000-bushel bin by 9:30 Monday morning.”
Hostetter said that his is a world of trust and relationships. “If you think about what we do, we write grain contracts that could value well over a million dollars, all done with a simple conversation over the phone, followed up by a one-page contract, either by mail or email,” he said. “And it works.”
If it were any other industry, it would be a much more complex transaction, with multiple layers of lawyers, pages of contracts, and hundreds of emails. In the faster, often sterile world outside of agriculture, where relationships are not cultivated, texting is preferred. Handshakes are improbable. It is good to be reminded, then, that there are still places in this world not so detached from the people and things in which they deal.
Hostetter, 64, said that no matter who he is working with in the industry — the producer or the end user — it is a great industry to be part of. “We work with salt-of-the-earth people,” he said, “honest people, trustworthy people.”
For those who would look at this assessment as naive, Hostetter is not that. There is something to be said about anyone who has spent an entire career dealing with transactions this way, and has not only grown the business, but has been arguably very successful. In fact, he now looks forward to his nephews — Jared, Eric, and Jason — taking over from him.
“I guess the greatest accomplishment was not only growing the business but now having it ready for the next generation to lead it forward — the third one in my family to take my parents’ risk into the future,” he said.
Hostetter’s life has not been without loss. Three years ago, his then 60-year-old brother Barry was battling late-stage pancreatic cancer. Like Bill, Barry was in the family business, and like Bill, his list of civic involvement in the community was long. He served on the Chester Co. Holstein Club, the Chester-Delaware County Farm Bureau Board, the Oxford Zoning Hearing Board, and the board of directors for the Lighthouse Youth Ministry in Oxford for over 30 years.
The Hostetter Farm.
(Salena Zito)
Because of Barry’s dedication, the community wanted to let him know what he had meant to them. His health took a sudden turn for the worse, and within days, local farmers volunteered to coordinate the local township, fire company, county sheriff’s department, state police, and PennDOT to close down the road leading to the Hostetters’ house. They put a call out to local farmers who worked with the family and hoped that a few trucks would show up for the prayer parade they wanted to offer for Barry.
Instead of a few trucks, several hundred grain trucks, tractors, and farm vehicles from several different states and surrounding counties came out to offer prayer for the Hostetter family. Many of them taped homemade signs of hope, love, and appreciation to the sides of their vehicles as they lined the road for miles and for hours for Barry.
“The sight of those trucks that just went on and on, and the effort it took to make that happen, with many of them traveling over the back roads to get here, was humbling,” Hostetter said, his voice cracking as tears welled up. “You never really know the impact you have on others. You just try to do your best every day.”
“Barry, well, he sat in his pickup on the farm, waving at everyone,” Bill said. “Barry passed not long after that, but he was able to see the impact he had had on other peoples lives, and he really, really enjoyed that day.”
Hostetter explained that his wife Melissa was also injured in a car accident in 1999. This left her with a spinal cord injury and wheelchair-bound at a young age.
“I admire overcomers, and her zest for life is powerful,” he said.
Hostetter lost his father Wilmer in February.
“He and my mother are the biggest influences on life,” he said. “It was such a great loss. Still ask myself every day, ‘Well, what would my father do in this situation?’”
Then, he smiled. “Why would anyone want to know my family’s story?” he asked. “There are thousands, millions of families like mine across this country.”
A partial answer may lie within a speech given 45 years ago by Paul Harvey at that year’s FFA Convention, when he described the hard work, sacrifice, and sense of community farmers and ranchers have passed down for generations in this nation.
The people who form the backbone of our country, often working from sun-up to sundown, caring for the land and their livestock, placing food on all of our tables, have stories of their own. We need to tell more of those stories.
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